Some thoughts. Other may disagree or have much to add:

1. Feather beds were for fancy folks. When my wife and I bought an 1840s 
Texas bed years ago it still had the homespun cotton "mattress"--a 
rectangular sack stiffed with corn husks. This was typical of bedding of 
the period. The bed is a bit short and is now used for guests (the short 
ones, anyway) with a modern mattress that I had to alter to fit. We kept 
the old sack but not the corn husks.

I also have some bedding that was made by somebody using 100 lb Mark 
Twain Flour flour sacks sewn together.

2. Yup.

3. Yup. Nope. This was folklore that was believed by many in those days. 
Ditto for "quicksilver."

4.  There's tons of stuff published on this topic. I'd suggest reading 
my essay "Was Huck Quaker?" to get some ideas about Huck's views, 
Twain's stance, Jim's influences, etc. You can find it free on JSTOR, I 
think. It was published in the MT Journal. There are other many other 
sources, but I'm biased.

5.  There's a lot written about this too, but I think the consensus is 
that Huck is about 12-14 years old.

For questions like these I'd strongly suggest buying a copy of Kent 
Rasmussen's Mark Twain: A--Z. Paperback copies are easily found both new 
and used online at amazon, Bookfinder, Addall, eBay, etc.

Kevin
@
Mac Donnell Rare Books
9307 Glenlake Drive
Austin TX 78730
512-345-4139
Member: ABAA, ILAB, BSA

You can browse our books at:
www.macdonnellrarebooks.com


------ Original Message ------
From: "Daniel P. B. Smith" <[log in to unmask]>
To: [log in to unmask]
Sent: 7/7/2022 11:28:27 AM
Subject: Layperson with questions about history and social background in 
"Huckleberry Finn"

>I just reread _Adventures of Huckleberry Finn_ after a gap of perhaps forty years. I’m no scholar, hope this is appropriate for the group.
>
>I am fascinated by the problems of trying to see through _two_ cultural filters—Twain writing in the 1880s, nostalgically, about life in the 1840s and possibly telling some “stretchers” for comic or entertainment effect, and seeing through the eyes of Huckleberry Finn.
>
>1) Huck, the Duke, and the Dauphin visit a small town on the banks of the Mississippi, apparently middle class, and the bed is “a feather-bed” on top of a “straw-tick,” I suppose corresponding to modern mattress and inner-spring. Is that in fact a normal middle-class bed for the era? What would Mark Twain have slept on in his house in Hartford? Vermin are not mentioned, do we assume that the presence of vermin in bedding was too normal to mention, or were they kept under control by frequent replacement of the bedding?
>
>2) "Col. Grangerford was a gentleman, you see. He was a gentleman all over; and so was his family…. every day of his life he put on a clean shirt and a full suit from head to foot made out of linen so white it hurt your eyes to look at it…” Is that how Mark Twain himself dressed?
>
>3) He mentions firing a cannon over a lake in hope of making drowned bodies come to the surface. Was this a common idea in those days? Could it possibly have worked?
>
>How about the custom of “put[ting] quicksilver in loaves of bread and float[ing] them off, because they always go right to the drownded carcass and stop there?” Was that a widespread belief? Was “quicksilver" an easy thing to find in small towns in those days, what was it used for, and where did it come from?
>
>How would anybody possibly get the idea of “quicksilver" doing that? What could have been the origin of such a belief?
>
>4) As I read it, Huck completely accepts the idea of enslaved people as legitimate property. Do you think Twain was satirizing and exaggerating slightly by the consistent way this idea is conveyed, e.g. "The old gentleman owned a lot of farms and over a hundred [enslaved people]?” In any case, I think all readers sense that Twain completely accepted the Abolitionist view that enslaved people are human and that slavery is an abomination, and expects his readers to agree. Twain seems to think that the 1885 reader will rejoice Huck’s decision not to inform on Jim; the reader is supposed to feel that Huck was doing the right thing, and was wrong in thinking he was doing the wrong thing.
>
>Twain sidesteps the full working out of this idea by the unlikely plot trickery in the extended part of the book in which Huck and Tom Sawyer “free” Jim. Jim has actually already been freed, and Tom Sawyer knows it, but not Huck or Jim. The fact that Jim is free is hinted at so strongly and so often that the reader probably guesses it. So, the book’s point of view is that Jim was enslaved, slavery is wrong, Jim ought to be free… but the issue of actually stealing property is only teased, not performed.
>
>The book was published in 1885, twenty years after the Civil War. Was Mark Twain taking risks in assuming this point of view? Was the end of slavery widely accepted as a fait accompli in 1885, or were contemporary southern US readers hostile and critical of the book?
>
>5) Isn’t Huck a lot older than he appears in the original illustrations for the book? He looks about nine years old to me, but he is “thirteen or fourteen” and his ability to make complicated plans involving adult behavior seem consistent with an even older age.
>